OpenMRS 1.8.0 Beta Released

I’m glad to announce that OpenMRS 1.8.0 beta is now available! You can download it here. It is faster and optimized for better performance than the prior releases in several ways, since our main focus for this release was to address the performance bottlenecks in the core application and a couple of modules as the community requested. With that in mind, there are few new features, check below for the highlights.

Note, this version of OpenMRS is a prerelease and not considered worthy for production use. Please help the community by taking a few minutes to test the best features that you currently use and the new features you cannot wait to use. Then, should you happen to find any bugs, please report them in our ticket tracking system, JIRA.

Performance Improvements

The Patient Dashboard and a number of other pages load faster.

Searching for data (e.g., patients by name) returns results faster.

The cohort builder has been sped up.

The data exports feature has been improved to preserve memory and attain better speed

More performance focused work has been done in the modules that are commonly used across most implementations, feel free to browse the module repository to check for any new versions and upgrade.

See the release notes for the complete list of performance improvements.

You can visit the performance improvement statistics page to view the performance measurement comparisons between version 1.8.0 beta and 1.7.0 stable release. Read the Performance Tuning page on our wiki to see how best you can tune/set global properties for your installation for better performance.

New Features

Program Location Module has been incorporated into the Core application

Improved workflow when adding a new program and state

Added complex obs BinaryDataHandler to core

Showing of a list of currently logged in users

Ability to archive HL7 to file system instead of moving it to file system

A big thank you to all of you that have contributed! Your relentless hard work is a success. This release features some 42 developers and over 350 commits. To check some of your contributions, and to download and try this out (not in a production environment) and test your modules, head over to the release notes page.

Please continue to contribute all you can to make OpenMRS better and the most reliable and robust open source medical records system in existence today! We thank you all for making this all possible.

Congratulations all! We look forward to your continued support, dedication, and contributions.